


nothing to fear from the siren’s call

by cicak



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, F/M, Football | Soccer, Love at First Sight, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, a whole battalion of headcanons, happy endings, how Rios got his groove back, post-Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:00:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23484208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: Cristóbal Rios is not Odysseus.
Relationships: Agnes Jurati/Cristóbal Rios
Comments: 28
Kudos: 77





	nothing to fear from the siren’s call

Ten years, nearly, since he lost everything and was sworn to silence. The thought is intrusive, this sword of damocles hanging over him. A decade. Ten years. It’s a long time. There’s something about that day, that anniversary, that terrifies him. That it will be important, that when it arrives, it’s a point he can’t come back from, even though all of time works like that. Time moves in only one direction, away.

Nearly a decade. A decade is significant. He’s not sure why, exactly. Probably because there’s a word for it, in all the languages he knows, even ones who don’t traditionally count in base 10.

There's not a lot of people who genuinely remember Commander Rios, these days. A decade will do that. He's a memory. He wants to be a memory, an anecdote, the handsome commander, Starfleet perfect, who had a breakdown and was cashiered out into the loving arms of Starfleet medical. Even to himself, to his family, to the few friends who cling to him through an occasionally checked mail account even after a decade, sending textbook male bonding missives like _“Hey, did you see the match? Your boys are doing well! Never thought I’d see the day. Miss talking about futbol and winding up the andorians”,_ or _“Hey chris, r u on planet, we're trying to get a five-a-side team together from the old crew.”_ or just versions of _“Let me know when you're next on earth. Miss you man. (I’ve had beers).”_

(Whenever the despair rises and he wants to cry thinking about how his life has been like this for ten fucking years, instead he breaths and reminds himself - not a decade. Not yet. There’s still time.)

* * *

He tells himself that this is an opportunity.

He spends the first year following his beloved team around the sector. He buys a special package that gives him tickets and transports as part of a core group of superfans who travel the quadrant watching every game. He loses himself in that group like it's a new crew, a new family to cling to who won’t betray him, who won’t tell him what to do, who won’t die. Clings to the ritual of match day. His scarf is his uniform, no matter the weather it’s draped around his neck, worn and well used until it’s unravelling in places, all very metaphorical for his fractious mental state. His favourite part is taking the crowded transport with tens of thousands of beings who don’t know him from Adam, relishing in the pleasure of chatting to little kids about their favourite player on the long walk to the ground, feeling the burn climbing into cheap seats in a block and being taken entirely away by the sound and the singing and the swearing at the ref’s biased, bigoted decisions against them all. Just being one of the thousands there to watch twenty two men kick a ball around according to an ancient set of rules everyone holds in their heads and interprets in similar, but not identical, ways.

It isn’t quite enough, but he forces it to hold him together, _makes_ the social threads of culture and the fixtures list hold him together, keep him going.

The team finished a respectable fifth in the league, no risk of relegation. He makes no real friends that year, but he survives it, and no one asks questions.

* * *

According to his file, he got an honourable discharge, which means that he is entitled to receive his care at any one of the veterans bureaux across the quadrant. (Even without it, he would have been entitled, but it allows him to keep his head high, to think, I deserve this, on paper. This is my right. They took everything away, except for this.)

Somehow, despite the constant headlines in the press about how veterans of the Dominion war deserve better, lungs and limbs still suffer. When he sits in the waiting room, it's a reminder that the future he always expected for himself is gone. It shouldn’t be a relief, but it is. A release. He won’t be a hero, like them, not pay either the ultimate price or the lingering one. He see scarred lungs from Breen weapons, clotting disorders from Jem’Hadar disruptors, twenty year sufferers of vacuum sickness and trauma, so much trauma.

He has trauma, but it is private, secret. Part of the deal is that he cannot talk about it to anyone, not even a psychiatrist.

The medics say he's recovering from trauma well, and formally discharge him from treatment in the first year. The treatment they give him works even though he can’t cathartically purge it, make it someone else’s problem, and the flashbacks mostly stop, apart from on the worst days when other stressors reduce his ability to cope. Then it sneaks back in, kicking at his defenses, not the deaths but the smaller acts, the way his voice sounded authorising the deletions, masking the vented bodies from the computer, destroying evidence.

All very normal, he’s told.

You aren’t allowed to discharge someone for being traumatised, not in this day and age. Post-Traumatic Dysphoria is officially his diagnosis, but it's vague on purpose, because to add specifics adds too much complexity, and complexity leads to questions, which leads to the sealed documents, which lead to the truth, that mutiny means prison and a discharge without honour.

* * *

For 24 hours after, everything was fine. His hands were clean. He alerted the crew to the sad death of their Captain and took command, as per all his training.

An alert came through on his console with the new shield harmonics frequencies, and it suddenly was too much. His brain ground to a halt.

The only thing he could think to do was delete it, pretend it never happened.

And so he did.

He couldn't follow orders anymore. Small orders or large ones, it didn’t matter. He was in command of the ship after the death of the captain, and over the three weeks he was in command he received twenty-seven orders from command and he deleted every single one. The crew liked him, trusted him, had no reason to doubt his actions. He did nothing out of the ordinary, let the ship just keep humming along like a beehive, busy and self-sustaining, with no one realising that the missions they were going on were fabrications.

It was undetectable at first, because he now knows that he’s good at falsifying records, and they had orders from before the incident to complete. He didn’t do things that Starfleet didn’t want done. He went about the business of running the ship as if they’d been told to complete their mission. No one would doubt him, Commander Rios, the golden child, the last person you’d ever guess would disobey orders and take a starship on a joyride for three weeks. Whenever Starfleet called he just ignored it, laughed with his Yeoman about his absent-mindedness when brass left messages with her, and said he’d deal with it later.

Eventually of course they caught him. A strike team was dispatched, and security stormed the bridge and manhandled him out of the chair, pushed his face down into the carpet and arrested him in front of the night shift, a couple of newly-minted Ensigns wide-eyed and shocked witnesses to his accusations, the transporter chief dismissed before they beam Rios off the ship in chains, put into a cell and is brought back to Earth, maximum warp.

They threatened him with mutiny, and then begged him to deny it when he didn’t roll over, when the threat didn’t work. Why would he deny it? It was a textbook mutiny. Even a boring mutiny, where no one but him knew they weren't following orders anymore, is an unacceptable breakdown in command discipline.

They threaten to throw the book at him, then tried to reason with him, and ultimately bought in the big guns, the negotiators whose names are written in textbooks. They congratulate him on his wiliness, on forcing their hand. They can’t charge him with mutiny without there being an inquest, and they won’t have one. The truth will not be free.

He gets the medical discharge, no ‘m word’ on his flawless, worthless record, written out completely of Starfleet's long history of mutiny over the years, not even a footnoted mention for Acting Captain Rios, the most banal mutineer in history.

He hears from his crewmates that the Ibn Majid was scrapped. Something about a flaw in the warp nacelles, a ticking time bomb, the whole thing could have gone up at any moment. The whole crew was reallocated, scattered across the fleet, and when later, he asked Raffi to look into it for him, she found that the records were wiped better than he’d ever managed to do himself.

\---

He resists for years the call of the black, until Earth feels like an amusement park populated with actors and false fronts. He takes jobs on other ships, but the change is there for good; he still can't take orders. His first year back out there he serves on twelve freighters, making a month on each one before getting shitcanned with extreme prejudice.

He takes some solo jobs on the black market, gets some latinum and buys a gently used ship on the grey market. It's registered on a federation friendly world, but _not_ a member planet. One owner from new, the owner got it in a divorce, caught his freighter captain wife cheating on him and just wanted it gone as soon as possible.

When he gets the command keys to the freighter, it's the first time in four years that he feels steady.

He was never Odysseus. He loved serving, had no real yearning for home outside of the fond memory of taste of his mother’s cooking and the football results. There were no wife and kids waiting for him at home.

When he heard the sirens call, he went willingly. He had nothing to fear.

* * *

He's bilingual like most citizens of the federation, and like all Starfleet officers he's used to working in fed standard, the language of Starfleet, but his inner rebel balks at doing his daily tasks from muscle memory. He finds a way to change everything into Spanish, even down to translating some modules himself, making up words when he has to, forcing this ship to respond only to him. This is _not_ a Starfleet ship, it's _his_ ship. It's going to be different, this time.

He talks to himself in his mother tongue, insists on the accent in his name on all documents, makes them accommodate him the way they’d accommodate the skrall of Andorian without a second thought.

He doesn’t want a crew and doesn’t have the funds to field one anyway. He has a well rounded academy education and a dozen years experience, there’s nothing this ship can throw at him he can’t figure out. It’s not like he has anywhere to go.

He gets the hang of the engine easily, spends hours on his back tweaking it just so that she purrs like a kitten and he reduces his fuel bill by 13%.

The thing he struggles through most is setting up the holograms. The language was the easy part, but once he worked that out he found he didn’t care about the other 13,000 possible customisation options (even without going into advanced mode and writing the code himself) and eventually just pressed default installation, and then when he sees the horror that the ship spits out, can't work out how to change them from that awful nightmare of being answered back to by his own fucking face. To be confronted by all the parts of your psyche every time you need help with a stuck bolt or in cleaning a tall bulkhead is a peculiar nightmare that not even the torturers of section 31 could have thought up.

He always means to put some time in to really learn their visual logic, or just to wipe them, but no matter how bored he is, the manual makes his eyes hurt from how deeply frustrating he finds holo programming, and so bar messing around with sound files and dressing them up for his amusement, he leaves them be, setting their trigger actions to the absolute minimum.

* * *

He didn’t know Raffi when they were in the service. She's a few years older, her cruising days behind her by the time he joined staff, and she was a member of intelligence anyway. He knew of her only by reputation, and even then only once she was on the Verity and saving the galaxy, then mentions on the news of her fall from grace and her sacking, all a few years before his own fall from grace.

The first time he flew into Earth’s air space (his mother’s eightieth birthday), Raffi commed him thirty times as he circled Santiago de Chile’s airspace, awaiting landing clearance, and every time he blocked her she just called him on another ID.

Eventually, he answered. “What the fuck is your problem? Stop calling me” and hung up before he could hear her reply, and mutes the comm system in frustrated triumph, before swearing to himself and turning it back on just in time to be given his landing clearance.

The next morning there’s a message waiting for him. “Sorry. Unregistered ships over the Americas on the 8th July and way too much snakeleaf makes me think that we’re being invaded by aliens like it's 1947. Retro alien-invasion reenactment is my thing apparently when I’m high. Let me make it up to you?” She’s left him coordinates, and it's a few minute hop up the coast, and he has nothing better to do, so he doesn’t think about it, and ten minutes later he’s knocking on her door.

She makes him lunch and plies him with beer, apologising a few times before she finds out he’s ex-Fleet and bitter like she is, and they shoot the shit about nothing and everything until he’s surprised by the sun setting over the mountains. He’s been there all day.

“I should probably be going” he says, but instead she ignores him, grabs her bag and proposes instead that they go into town and get something to eat. They eat Mexican food from a hole in the wall place, sauce running down their wrists as they argue about authenticity before realising neither of them actually give a shit, and continue drinking and talking, the town seedy and alive the way he thought you had to leave the planet to find these days. The bar they end up in plays terrible Vulcan electronica and is full of patrons right through until the early hours, tourists and locals alike.

Raffi attempts to hustle him at pool, but she’s pretty much incoherent on the snakeleaf, and when he tries to get her back he realises that he’s so fucking drunk, possibly drunker than he’s ever been in his life at this point, and that is hilarious, so they mostly giggle and lean on each other and try to set up trick shots that they fail to sink before someone yells at them to stop hogging the table.

They stagger out of the bar just as dawn starts to break, and they make it three doors down before they fall into a tattoo parlour, some old tourist trap, and Rios falls asleep face down in the chair as the cute Orion boy affixes the transfer to his arm.

When he wakes up a few hours later, his arm hurts like a motherfucker and he’s so hungover he thinks he might actually die. They stagger back to the taqueria for breakfast burritos and go back to Raffi’s to sleep it off. She falls asleep in the first chair she finds, her hair sticking up and looking small and so sad, and he can’t just leave her there, and so uses his last chivalrous reserves to carry her inside, tucking her into bed before collapsing on top of the covers himself.

When he wakes up it’s 3PM, Raffi’s snoring solidly next to him and he really should leave, but he can’t remember anywhere he has to be. His comm is blank, and there’s no restrictions on parking out here, so he has another drink instead, settles on the deck and waits for Raffi to wake up.

She lets herself out onto the deck and sits next to him, med-tricorder in her hand that’s seen better days. “You want me to take care of that for you?” gesturing to his arm.

He cranes his neck to look at it. He remembers seeing the art on the wall and knowing immediately that it would complete him to have it part of him. It was destiny, as much as drunken decisions at 3AM can be destiny. The lines are thick and fairly straight, and when he touches it the skin is hot and raised, burning like the Californian sun. The pain has faded since the morning, and it’s weeping a bit, but it looks fine.

“Actually, I think I’ll keep it.”

Raffi nods, “It’s not the best work, but it’s not that bad, for a tourist tat,” and goes to put the tricorder away, coming back with two cold beers.

“So what’s your real deal”, she asks, as the sun goes down and they’ve demolished half the replicator menu. “I looked you up. Not a lot there, you were pretty much on track for that fourth pip before you turned forty. All your intelligence file says is ‘medical reasons’,” she takes a moment to give him a leering once over, so over the top to be comic “but baby, you look _fine_ to me.”

He shakes his head and smiles into the neck of his beer bottle. “Nothing to tell. Mission went bad, and I couldn't get over it. Gets the best of us.”

“Bullshit.” Raffi says, blowing out a huge plume of smoke that makes his vision blur. “They would have grounded you, worst case. No one gets cashiered for trauma, and I can read between the lines, you were shitcanned, same as me, just a hell of a lot more politely. There’s a man at intelligence who has no limbs and screams for three hours a day and he still writes damn good reports that have saved countless lives. No, there’s something else there. I bet it’s because of the synth ban. What did you do, have a robotic dog in your quarters or something? A sexbot you just couldn’t give up, that belonged to your father?”

He forces himself to laugh as he gets a flash of red blood on gold skin, unseeing, trusting eyes looking at him like they had never seen betrayal before.

“Something like that.” he murmurs, lost for a long moment, before snapping back. “Look, leave it, Raf”, he says. “It was stupid. Really, really stupid. And classified. About as classified and stupid as it could get.”

She smiles a small smile, her eyes sad, and takes another deep hit of her own personal downfall.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.”

* * *

He leaves the next morning, for real this time, but they stay in touch. He comes back to Earth a few times a year and they get drunk and catch up, and they don’t talk about their pasts again, barely mentioning the fleet at all. He doesn’t get any more tattoos, but Raffi does, and in the morning she always asks him to remove them for her. There are names that repeat, over the years, motifs, spirals, but he doesn’t need to dissect them to know the shape of her regrets.

Sometimes he gives her a lift to meet some of her conspiracy friends, and sometimes she finds him on various independent worlds and hits him up for bail money. She turns out to be good for business, and he spends the next few years ferrying various conspiracy nuts around, getting into the occasional dogfight, and making some good money and contacts in the quadrant that help him find his niche.

When she calls him in ‘99, he expects the usual pitch. Some nutcase with theories about how holonovels are making us all sterile or something needs to feel important, wants an unregistered ship to take him to some anonymous planet because he believes planetary defences will shoot on sight, or some beautiful arms dealer wants a certain type of arm candy to lurk menacingly in the background of their meetings, not knowing his pulse rifles ran out of charge years ago.

“It’s actually not your beautiful face I want this time.” Raffi says. “I’ve got someone who wants to hire your ship.”

“They always want to hire my ship, my ship isn’t for hire without my face sitting in this chair. You still owe me for the last one. I can’t be getting banned from Ferengi worlds, Raf, I need them to get latinum to live. I’ve explained this before, outside of paradise, latinum can be exchanged for goods and services...”

“Har har, don’t worry, since when has Auntie Raffi not kept you in the manner you’re accustomed? You know I’m good for everything you need, baby, from bootleg replicator recipes to artisan beard oil. Seriously though, Cris, you wanna take this one. I’ll even waive my usual fee, okay, that should pay you back what I owe you. It has to be you, has to be unregistered, warp capable…” she pauses, and adds nonchalantly, “...able to evade the fleet.”

“Oh, fuck no. Fuck no. Are you crazy? I don’t fuck with the fleet, Raf, you know this.”

She argues back hard, the way they’ve come to practice on each other to hide their soft underbellies. “Bull. Shit. You could have updated your registration at any time in the last five years, Cris. Any time. You could go legit in a heartbeat, but you don’t, because you’re a petty son of a bitch and you _live_ to fuck with the fleet. And honestly, nothing would fuck with them more than this! I bet you’re curious now, yeah?”

He’s intrigued, despite his better interests. He should have known better.

Actual living legend Jean-Luc Picard arrives just as he misjudges a repair and gets a wedge of trit embedded in his shoulder, which means that his fucking EMH deploys just as the seven-time saviour of the Federation fucking saunters into the cockpit as he’s being tended to by a posh English hologram _with his own face_. He’s so glad that his beard and the pain of his shoulder hides the worst of the blushing from his absolute mortification. It’s all a fucking disaster waiting to happen, but Picard insists that he can pay, that he’s long and even though he knows he shouldn’t, Rios accepts, and when Raffi calls back a few hours later and hacks La Sirena’s computer to beam her up while he’s yelling at her for not telling her Picard was her fucking client, he just accepts that this whole thing is out of his hands.

* * *

Picard brings with him a little blonde woman, a doctor, and as Raffi starts to yell about security and spies with her usual paranoid fervour, Cristóbal Rios’ life changes once again.

He’s always had a thing for humans. The last woman he tried to pick up was human. She asked him what his ship name meant, in what language, and then asked him if Span was the name of his planet with a genuine curiosity that made his teeth itch. He faked a comm from his ship and went home alone. Before her...well. It’s been a while since he’s had casual conversation with anyone but Raffi, let alone anything more intimate.

Maybe that’s the reason he's immediately attracted to this mysterious blonde. Maybe this immediate, bolt from the blue, completely automatic fascination is just a lack of exposure to the opposite sex. She's _so pretty_ , his brain coos, hands clasped under his mental chin the way the computer pulled out and assigned Enoch, to his eternal humiliation. It's not lust, necessary, and it doesn’t _feel_ base, or prurient, or dirty, but it is sexual, in an amorphous way. It’s like there was a gap in his brain for her to slip into and get comfortable, like she was the missing piece he was waiting for.

The lizard part of his brain slithers out from under its rock and _yearns_ the first time he hears her voice.

He had never put much thought into imagining his perfect woman, and Agnes isn't that academic exercise of taste and preference and history, she isn't this beauty queen with poise and grace, she doesn't look like a holo actress or his first girlfriend or anyone from his history. If he'd seen a picture of her he would like to think he wouldn't have had the same reaction, not just because it’s 2399 and who sees a picture of a woman and immediately judges her attractiveness? He's not a flirter, never has been, never went in for that stereotype of the Starfleet officer who has esoteric hobbies and an eye for the ladies. He's got _normal_ hobbies, a _normal_ respect for women, and prefers them to make the first move.

But...he wants her. After so many years, it terrifies him.

He must just need a break, he rationalises. Spend some time with some other humans. Get his perspective back.

Over the next few weeks though, he's introduced to more women, of all races and shapes and sizes and he never gets a repeat of that initial thrill of seeing Agnes. Even the fenris ranger woman, who is more conventionally his type despite her hardware, doesn't give him that gut reaction. She’s beautiful and he registers it, but he’s totally normal about it.

So, it’s just Agnes then.

Doesn’t feel much better.

He thinks about it, applies himself to his own psyche like he can solve this puzzle through sheer logic. He convinces himself, eventually, that it’s a certain _something_ about Agnes he likes, similar to why he likes Raffi, who he has never felt anything more than deep, fundamental kinship. When he finds out Agnes ex-academy, digs a little to find out she’s a drop out (in the least drop out way possible) he takes that as proof. There's an aura to people who have turned their back on the ‘fleet, he thinks smugly, and that is his type. He senses in her a fellow traveller, someone who has seen shit. All very academic. If he swung that way, maybe he’d have felt that about the Admiral. He just likes his own kind. It must be that.

After a good handful of years of solitude barring the company of the various weirdos on the edges of Federation society, there's something about Agnes, about this little doctor ( _his little doctor_ ), this heartbreaking normalcy about her. She's a regular citizen. She doesn't know how to fly a ship, has never been off-planet before, not even to go to see cousins on Luna. (The planetscape view from Mari-Carmen's tiny box bedroom was one of the most formative memories, he was addicted after that to seeing the universe with his own eyes. His cousin was used to it, just the view from her bedroom window, but to see the blue marble, pick out the shapes of the continents himself, look down and see his world from outside, it changes a certain type of boy, and is probably why Starfleet has never suffered for applications.)

Agnes flirts with him, chats to him, annoys him, and even after his comprehensive self-diagnosis he is still so terrified at the magnitude of his want, that he wants to lean into her and complete this connection at all, lose himself in the back and forth of flirting and mutual attraction, an exponential reaction, a runaway train of satisfied urges, that he shuts down. He hides behind his book, behind Raffi, behind being the starship captain, behind what Raffi calls his brooding spaceman routine.

He thinks he’s got away with it after Freecloud, thanks to all the fuckups. They’re all busy and scared and irritated, and sex is far from his mind. Their mission has gone awry, the man they came here for is dead and Agnes is devastated, and he just wants to go to her, hold her, tell her it’ll be okay, even if it isn’t.

He’s fucking about in ship’s night, unable to sleep, putting off all the things he should be doing by kicking the ball around, and then she’s there, and he’s a liar, such a liar. His heart skips, the way it always does when he sees her, but now they’re alone, and she’s wearing just a thin tank and all he can think about is her shoulders and arms and bare feet and scrubbed clean face, still puffy from crying. Everyone else is asleep or detoxing or hiding from the galaxy, and it’s just them for the first time.

His heart hurts from the want. That out of control feeling is back, and she’s walking towards him and they’re talking, they’re flirting, and he wants her so fiercely, so clearly, feels so out of control.

He shouldn’t.

They kiss each other in perfect synchronicity, it feels almost psychic how they’re saying one thing and doing a dance millions of years of human evolution has perfected, a man and a woman, two people who really fucking want each other, giving into the pull of each other’s desire.

And then she’s saying she shouldn’t, saying it's a mistake, and he is so relieved for a moment, understands because it is a mistake to give into this, to be unprofessional like this, to be reckless, to think that you can have this just because it's _easy_. It’s always too easy to find a reason to do the thing you shouldn’t do. Strength comes from doing the right thing.

She kisses him again, and leads him to his quarters anyway.

He’s never taken a woman to this bed before, always rented rooms in love hotels on skeevy hub planets when he finds himself in need of a soft surface. His bed is special, sacred, his own perfect space. He spent years in the service in awful standard issue bunks, the weird flat pillows and the functional but unsatisfying thin blankets, everything ergonomic and hyper-optimised for good sleep to ensure perfect service but never _great_ sleep, never _good sex_ , never the kind of bed that is conductive to long afternoons lounging irresponsibly reading or talking or listening to music or each other’s pasts. This bed though, this is a bed you don’t want to leave, even as your hips hurt from the softness and the bed creaks with vigorous movement, it lets you know that you’re alive.

She smells perfect, she tastes perfect, he wants her so much, loves her already even though he shouldn’t, knows that she is the missing part, even though he doesn’t believe in any of that. (Humans are very good at believing in things that aren’t real, and refusing to accept things right in front of their face.)

When she climbs on him, his face soaked through after (licking, sucking, eating, worshipping her), slides him carefully inside her, so wet and strong and squeezes like a vice around his dick, he feels so great, this brightness pushing the gnawing melancholy to the side for a while, that he’s messed this up, he’s ruining this opportunity with every thrust, that she won’t respect him in the morning, or the rest of their lives.

* * *

She falls asleep in his arms, but when he wakes up she’s snuck back into her quarters, and so he goes through his morning routine resolutely trying to not feel anything at all for as long as possible and relieves the autopilot. He’s got enough to worry about but when he sees her, his heart does a flip and he does his best to hide it.

* * *

It all goes to shit, again, and Agnes tries to kill herself, and then his past finally bursts out like a third act twist, a knife in the ribs, a kick in the balls and Soji is _Jana_ , the planet of the synths was _her planet_ , all sickeningly pat and tied together, pulling him into this vast conspiracy the way he was so sure he wasn’t anything but another footnote, the man who flew the ship, safe in obscurity.

Fuck.

* * *

And then, it’s over. The galaxy is saved, Picard is dead, and Rios sits on Jana’s planet and drinks until he’s as drunk as he can stand being when he’s this sad. They saved the galaxy, sort of. Well, he was there. He helped. It was really the synths who saved themselves, and the fleet, and the admiral sacrificing himself, and Rios is back where he belongs, an also-ran, a footnote, one for the academics. He’s still got all his limbs, his ship is fixed, and even though he’s probably about to lose Agnes to her beautiful robot children and an old man who treats her like she’s his assistant, that’s apparently her type, and he wants her to be happy.

He goes back to his ship, and starts tidying up.

He hears footsteps on the trit floor, and then Agnes hugs him from behind, presses her face between his shoulder blades and inhales hard. He turns, takes her into his arms, and holds her. When he looks down, he expects to see her tear-stained and puffy, like last time, but instead she’s grinning. She kisses him hard, and he tastes joy and triumph on her tongue, and when she playfully whispers “take me to bed, cap-i-tan”, they almost don’t make it to the bed, he nearly has her right there on the floor.

There's still sunlight streaming in when they’re done, basking in the afterglow naked on top of the covers in the sun warmed spot like a pair of cats as Agnes describes her triumph, tells him about how she’s done the impossible and bought the Admiral back from the dead.

Why would you make a ship with so many windows was something he never really understood about his ship, until now, lying naked, sated and warm, Agnes curled in his arms, babbling a mile a minute, feeling all the more like a holiday, like something normal, a dirty weekend on Risa, a lazy sunday, a blessed life.

* * *

He knows it's the end, that this couldn’t last. He wants to leave Coppelius, but Raffi keeps telling him to stay put, give it another day. _La Sirena_ is fixed, Narek is out of his makeshift brig, and all Rios wants is to get it over with, so he walks over into Synthville and takes things into his own hands.

He finds Agnes in a lab, the robot cat sitting on her communicator, her fingers caught in its fur.

“You'll be happy here”, he says, trying to rip the bandage off cleanly.

“What?” she says, rousing slightly from where she was in reverie.

He smiles at her. “I'm so happy for you. You deserve it, to get everything you dreamed of.”

She looks at him for several long moments entirely blank, like she's buffering, stuck in the final moment.

“Back up. I feel like I’ve missed some nouns. What are you happy for me about?”

“About you staying here, changing the galaxy. I’m so proud of you.” He beams.

“I'm not going to stay here,” she says, slowly.

“You're not?”

She shakes her head. “No. Too many ghosts. And anyway, I’ve already got a job. And I've got to get back to write it up. No rest for the academic.”

She steps off the stool, and wraps her arms around him. “Let’s go home”, she murmurs against his mouth, and he decides to believe her.

* * *

He flies them back into the loving, pissed off bosom of Earth in record time, even as Soji and Seven try to backseat-transwarp pilot the ship.

Planetary flight control doesn’t give him any of the usual trouble, but does make him fill out the same form they must have hundreds of duplicates now on the system. He fills the crew manifest out, and for the first time he needs to add additional rows to fit them all on.

True to her word, when he asks the crew where they want to be dropped off, Agnes doesn’t say anything. They drop Raffi and Seven in California (and he’s so pleased for her, for both of them) and then after some patient explaining to Elnor, drops the rest of them, Picard, Soji and Elnor, in France, and then it's just them, him and Agnes, left.

She drops into his lap after he sets _Sirena_ into a stable orbit, and kisses him, backed by the beautiful blue of home.

They take care of each other. He always thought intimacy was showing the other person the darkest parts of yourself and hoping they wouldn't reject you. That love had to come with a test. Not that he could tell anyone, before, what he'd done, that the kindness that the fleet has done for him was a chain around his neck.

Eventually, Agnes needs to go back to work, and before he even asks, she books a spot in the starport on the outskirts of Okinawa City for his ship, and installs him in her apartment. It’s small and has nods to Japanese traditions, but it smells like her perfume and is full of weird textbooks and a huge alien plant that unfurls itself every morning with the rising sun. He bumps his head on the low ceilings, and they can’t both fit in the shower, and he’s unused to being barefoot so much, but he never feels unwelcome there. The flat is perfectly optimised for efficient, calm living, everything with a place labelled with cutesy stickers and a hand he’s starting to recognise as Agnes’.

There were people back home, who came from other parts of Earth and other planets in the Federation, who tried too hard to fit in, to take on another culture as a badge of honour. One of the things he likes about Agnes is that as far as he can tell, she hasn’t done that, even though she’s lived in Okinawa longer than she’s lived anywhere else. If someone asks where she’s from, she tells them where she was born. She doesn’t try to show off, tell them she’s lived in Japan for nearly twenty years, put people who’ve lived here their whole lives at ease, that she’s not like those _tourists_.

The third time someone brings her a knife and fork in a restaurant, removing her chopsticks helpfully, he asks her why. Why she doesn’t say that she’s not a visitor to this place, that she’s lived here longer, probably, than the bored teenagers serving them have.

She shrugs. “It’s not a problem. I just...have a job here. I’ve lived here for a long time, I speak fairly good Japanese. But I still crave cheese fries when I’m hungover.” She shrugs.

“Is that a Japanese saying?” he asks.

“No? Oh, sorry. What I mean is that back home, when you’re hungover, you go and get cheese fries at this one place. It’s a home-town thing. I may have never really done it more than a few times, but it is a sign of belonging. Even though I know that other things are better hangover cures, even if spending the morning forcing the replicator to overcome its default settings and give me grease is a complete waste of time, I still do it, because it's part of me.

"Some people are visitors everywhere they go", she shrugs. "I'll always be a visitor. It's not home. It's not bad to be one. It just is. I don’t need their validation".

He thinks of the Lieutenant on the Ibn Majid who made it a point to drink mate from a proper cup he bought up some mountain in Argentina, who talked about how replicated wasn’t the same and made a point to do the whole ritual in the mess with one eye on Rios for approval, even though he never really bothered to check whether Rios himself was even from that part of Chile. If he’d paid attention, that Lieutenant, he would know that his Commander had always ordered the same drink, coffee, black, with three sugars, ever since the first time he had to pull an all-nighter at the academy.

* * *

She keeps surprising him, even after this cohabiting project stretches out past milestones he’s only seen occasionally before, one month, then two.

“Haven’t you got somewhere to be?” she asks, genuinely, as he queues up another game of FIFA99. “What do you do normally, when you’re not getting caught up in secret Romulan plots?”

“What do you mean normally? I’m a captain of a ship. I run the ship. I fix the ship. I take contracts. Sometimes I get drunk with Raffi, I guess. Do you want some privacy?”

“No”, she says, with a strange smile on her face. “It’s nice having you here. But I still am curious. I don’t think I really knew what you did, before we got caught up in the whole saving the galaxy thing.”

He sits up, discarding his PADD at his feet. “What about you? What do you do? When you’re not…” he trails off.

“Committing murder and breaking the synth ban? Well, I do research. I mostly develop computer models of positronic brains, hypothetically try and change the world that way. I write papers, I lecture masters level cybernetics at Daystrom and teach a module on the history of the synth ban to undergraduates. I supervise students, do various academic tasks like appearing on hiring panels and co-edit a journal. I hike, sometimes, even though I hate it. Are the views worth it? I ask myself every time. I travel and see places on Earth. I’m in a book group where we aim to read classic literature but instead drink a lot of wine, and I go to the opera. Oh, and I have a plant.”

“Okay, I get it.” he says, suddenly feeling aware of something he’d been suppressing for a long time now, something he’d been trying not to think about.

“No, don’t be...what do you like to do? You have six books on your shelves, we’re reading Dracula this month, do you have a copy? You could come. You have a soccer ball, did you used play in a team? I’m sure we could find one…”

“I have you.” he says, before he changes his mind.

Her face softens, and she looks like she’s going to cry, but in a good way. “Oh, Cris”.

* * *

Later, when he’s left Agnes beloved and sated in bed with her papers, he gets a comm from a withheld number and answers it without thinking. How things have changed, he ruminates later, as he stares at the unit in shock. Time was someone called him on a blank number, he’d have left the system, just to be safe.

“Hello Captain Rios” the pleasant male voice on the line had said. “This is Lieutenant Fala from Commodore Clancy’s office. She would like to find a date that she could meet with you to discuss some ongoing business you have with her.”

He had no ongoing business with Commodore Clancy, and says as much.

“I am just repeating what I was told by the Commodore, Captain. She was very insistent. Can I put you in for Monday the third? Three days from today? Ah good, your comm confirms you have nothing booked in then. We will see you then. Goodbye!”

When he transports across the pacific ocean later that week to Starfleet headquarters, he’s shocked by how the place looks the same. He was last here in shackles, a mutineer in all but name, being congratulated for playing a stalemate in a game he hadn’t realised he was playing, and now he’s a free man, but the city looks the same, that mix of modern and ancient scars on the landscape that have fascinated visitors for a thousand years.

The campus was always most beautiful in spring, and instead of the sense memory of humiliation and anger, he is instead swamped with the heart clutch of memory of love, love for the academy, for the structure of the service, for remembrance of things, of faith, long lost.

The reception outside the Commodore’s office had two people in it, a smartly dress-uniformed lieutenant who introduced himself as Fala, the man who had called him a few days earlier, and a rumpled and agitated looking Raffi, who relaxed a bit and rolled her eyes when she saw him, ostentatiously patting the chair next to her, like he’d ever consider sitting anywhere else.

“Do you think we’re going to be offered our commissions back?” he asks, _sotto voce_ , and is pleased by the look of horror that passes over her face.

“Oh god, I hope not. They can’t be that stupid, can they?”

“There’s no way I’m taking a demotion” he says, with sly nonchalance. “Bad enough having an Admiral on board as it is.”

“And there’s no way I’m letting you outrank me” she replies. “I’m older than you, for one.”

“It’s decided then. Joint admiralty for both of us, or nothing.”

“Deal” she says, and they shake on it with mock sobriety.

“The Commodore will see you now”, Fala announces, and escorts them the short walk across the room, through the door, and into the chairs in front of her desk, not entirely convinced they won’t make a run for it.

They both sprawl in the chairs like delinquent kids, non-newtonian in their insolence. The Commodore takes a long minute to look away from her screen, as if daring them to stop acting like children, before she snaps her eyes to them and gives them the once over.

“I don’t put up with posturing from goddamn Picard, I won’t take it from you two” she snapped. “Pull yourselves together.”

In one movement, the Pavlovian response of being shouted at by someone with red shoulders and a chest full of gold kicks in, and they're both sitting up straight. Raffi even calls Clancy ma’am as she apologises, even though he knows she’d kill him if he told anyone.

“Better”, the Commodore says. “Stop looking so terrified. I’m not here to draft your or whatever you were catastrophising about outside. You’re both still way more trouble than you’re worth.” her face softens, “And I know that that is our fault. You were both good officers, loyal, disciplined, smart - credits to the service. What we did to you both was unforgivable. We all forget how that the point of the bad apple analogy is that it spoils the bunch. Keeping a clean service is hard, it requires constant vigilance, and when we believe we’re better than that, that we’ve conquered human nature, it allows people like Oh to poison the whole goddamn barrel.”

She sighs, and rubs her eyes. “This is an official apology. Your records will be amended to tell the truth. You are officially free to rejoin the service should you want to, but I’m not going to invite you to or beg or even make the case for it, because, frankly, we don’t deserve it. There will be a public inquest, where the truth about the Romulan conspiracy and the Ibn Majid will be made public knowledge. Starfleet is going to learn from this, painfully, openly and publicly. We are aware that our reputation will be damaged, but it has been the opinion of the senior staff that we have been too focused on reputation management for too long, and not enough on learning from our mistakes. We will be punished, by the Federation government, by the court of public opinion, by the law, but we will rebuild, we will earn the respect and faith of the people of the Federation again, honestly and through good actions.”

They sit there, stunned.

“Thank you”, Rios says, faintly.

“Yeah,” Raffi echoes. “Thanks.”

“You’re free to go.” Clancy says, and they get up and start to leave before she calls out to him.

“Oh, Captain Rios?”

Clancy smiles a tight smile. “Register your damn ship”.

They walk out of Command headquarters and keep walking until they reach the steps outside.

“Do you think The Rocket is still open?” Raffi asks.

He lights a cigar and breathes in deeply before answering. “Stories say it didn’t even close during the Breen attack. Carver just switched the pumps to manual and kept on pouring.”

“Then, let's get drunk,” Raffi says, putting her arm through his. “Call your girl. She’s going to need to escort us home once she gets out of work.”

Agnes appears a couple of hours later, and instead of escorting them home, drinks with them until Carver cuts them off, and they wander around the Mission until they’re sitting by the bay with the late night tourists, feet dangling over the edge of the pier.

“I got a similar apology” Agnes says after they tell her about their meeting. “From the Daystrom management. They’re going to reverse the synth ban, soon as parliament comes back into session after the Vulcan high holiday.”

There’s footsteps behind them on the creaky old dock, and then someone drops down next to Raffi, a bag of bottles clinking unceremoniously onto the ground.

Seven opens a beer and tilts it towards them in silent greeting.

“How’d you find us?” Rios asks

“I knew your girl would probably end up getting drunk with us, so I had no choice but to call _my_ girl as backup” Raffi replied, with forced nonchalance.

Agnes reaches across to dig through Seven’s bag and clumsily opens a beer, wincing as she misjudges the angle and catches her palm. “Congrats” she says, clinking bottles with Seven, and then holding it out for Raffi, who rolls her eyes and clinked her comically large tequila bottle back. “Seriously. Congratulations.”

“Ugh, we’re going to be the worst, a small ship populated entirely by _couples_.” Raffi said. “Nauseating. We’re going to be so _cute_. JL is going to be so uncomfortable.” She pauses, considering. “Serves him right,” she grins. “The man gets off on breaking every bit of the uniform code apart from the fraternisation regs.”

“Well, as captain, I make the uniform code, and on my ship, fraternisation is encouraged” Rios says, taking a big swig from his own tequila bottle as punctuation. “Positively compulsory.”

Behind them, the inky night starts to fade, the first rays of light spilling over the hills and bathing the city in the sun, the promise of another perfect day in a perfect world.

He looks down at his chronometer and realises that it’s the 4th of April 2400, and he missed the decade anniversary by three days and hadn’t even noticed.

**Author's Note:**

> "I'll just write a Rios fic" I thought. "Just a short thing. Fill in some gaps. Maybe a bit of a break from the angst, for a treat." 
> 
> And then I started writing, and the gaps got more and more compelling, until I was genuinely worried I wouldn't stop, and that I was thinking more about this character than any of the people who actually wrote him. Turns out even though I mostly have a lot of feelings about Agnes, I also have a lot of feelings about our handsome, brooding, tragic Captain, and about misfits in the federation, and being ex-fleet, and more reflections on my own decade long PTSD journey. If you'd told 2010 cicak she'd be writing about it in the future and it would be a positive, reflective experience that didn't leave her a husk, she honestly wouldn't believe you, and already be crying. (She'd be pleased that star trek was back on TV though).
> 
> I see this and two of my previous Picard fics, [red to port, green to starboard, white to guide the way](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22943977), and [not a star in the sky that's got our name](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23358322), as all pieces that fit together into part of another whole, but as they're all designed to be independent pieces, I'm not bringing them together as a series. If you liked this though, and you want to read more of what I've written, specifically about Agnes, please give them a read! 
> 
> Come and chat with me on my [tumblr](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com), where Picard continues to be the epitome of #smallfandombestfandom. And consider leaving a comment, if you liked the fic. <3


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